


Peace like a Tree

by devilinthedetails



Series: Gift of Joy [3]
Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: CIRCLE OF LIFE, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Peace, Time - Freeform, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25222777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Jon, his father, his son, and the legacy of peace.
Series: Gift of Joy [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824448
Kudos: 6





	Peace like a Tree

Peace like a Tree

Roald was nine the autumn afternoon Jon led him to the courtyard where the apple tree commemorating the signing of the treaty that had ended the last war in a long stream of them waged with Tusiane. The tree, a green gift from Tortall to Tusaine, aspired to be an emblem of eternal, enduring peace between the two realms. So far, such a peace had stood as long as the apple tree. 

Jon wasn’t certain quite what had prompted him to choose this particular day to pass onto his oldest son heir the lesson and legacy his own father had shared with him in the same courtyard before the same apple tree—then a mere sapling. Maybe it was only that the sun was shining so brightly through the changing leaves that it felt as if the entire world should strive to be in harmony with one another as the chorus of birds singing in nests and on branches were with each other. Of course, any hope of harmony could be shattered by the Immortals—some of whom were hostile beyond any power of negotiation to sway—but he tried not to think of that. Instead he tried to remember his conversation in this courtyard with his father so many years ago. 

He remembered how his father had awakened him early to take him to this courtyard. That morning, the apple tree was starting to tentatively stretch from the soil and wouldn’t have provided shade for anyone taller than a toddler. Now it’s expansive branches could cover several picnic blankets, and it had become a coveted location for languid luncheons among the courtiers. 

“Do you know why this tree was planted?” His father had gestured at the sapling that would grow into the towering apple tree Jon saw before his eyes now. 

“To celebrate the peace with Tusaine.” Jon, a young and impatient knight, had tried and most likely failed to sound dutiful rather than as if he were irked his father had brought him out of bed at an obscene hour to tell him something he already knew. 

“Peace is like this tree.” His father had nodded, seemingly oblivious to Jon’s irritated impatience. “It’s small and vulnerable at first, but if diligently cultivated, it will grow into a strong tree that drops sustaining fruit from fertile branches. Like this tree, peace is a gift that keeps giving. For a country and for a king, there can be no greater joy than peace.” 

“Yes, Father.” Jon, who had heard his father expostulate at length on the virtues of peace too many times, felt his attention waver and wane with every word from his father’s lips. 

That suddenly changed, however, when his father continued in a quiet, resigned tone that was almost swallowed like dust in the wind, “The tree—although handsome and fruitful—won’t last forever, and neither will this peace. Landlocked Tusaine will ache to gain a foothold along the Drell and will war with us to secure it. The war may not come in my lifetime or yours, but it will come.” 

It had been so strange to hear his father, who had always prided himself on being titled The Peacemaker, comment on the inevitability of warfare that Jon had felt a shiver of foreboding snake up his spine. 

In the present once more, Jon plucked an apple from the tree and handed it to his son named in memory of his father. “This tree was planted in honor of the treaty that ended the last war with Tusaine, Roald. Peace is like this tree because you can eat an apple like the one you’re chewing now, find a seed, and plant it to grow another tree that’ll produce more apples. Peace is the tree and it’s also the seed of new growth. It’s the gift that keeps giving, my father told me shortly after this tree was planted.” 

“Do you believe that, Papa?” Roald took a neat, careful bite of his apple. He did everything neatly and carefully, Jon had noticed. 

“I do,” Jon said gravely. Then, because it reflected his own dark experiences, the tension between idealistic fantasies of harmony and brutal realities of conflict, the entwined legacies of war and peace that must be passed along to his son, he added, “But my father also told me that just as this tree would someday fall, peace couldn’t last forever.” 

“That’s what you believe more, isn’t it?” Roald’s eyes—colored like his but shaped like Thayet’s, and so much of the expression of eyes came from their shape, Jon had always thought—widened. He seemed to be weighing every word that emerged from Jon’s mouth in invisible scales hidden in his head. 

“Peace is the ideal.” Jon wasn’t going to surrender the dream of peace reigning over his realm even if the reality of it often eluded him and his kingdom. That had to mean that peace was truly undying in some sense if the hope of it persisted even through warfare, didn’t it? Thinking of the war with the Immortals disturbing the tranquility of his country—a war that would never truly be over unless the Immortals could be forced out of the Mortal Realms again— he sighed. “Reality doesn’t always conform to that ideal, and we must be prepared for that, son. Still we shouldn’t let that knowledge that war can always break out stop us from striving for peace. Do you understand?” 

Roald nodded, engaging in his usual conversational habit of absorbing everything and expressing nothing. For Jon, it was impossible to know what lesson his heir had learned—what legacy he had passed onto the next generation. It was unsettling to be the father attempting to pass along accumulated wisdom and experience rather than the son trying to create meaning and a future out of the past. 

Yet that was the nature of life as designed by the gods: that people grew up, gave birth to children, sought to raise their children to be wiser than themselves so the future could be brighter than the present, and then were claimed by the Black God to find the eternal peace that was so tantalizingly unobtainable in the Mortal Realms. He was in the high noon of his life and his reign but one day the sun of his life and reign would set to be replaced by the light shining from his oldest son. He could hear that truth whispered in the crisp breeze blowing through the apple tree as he stared at it, admiring how it had flourished in the thousands of days since its planting.


End file.
